Videos boost the online profile of eParty Unlimited

Consumers who watch a video have a 43% higher conversion rate than other shoppers.

Featuring videos on its site is helping consumers find eParty Unlimited, says Jimmy Weng, founder and president of the online-only party supplies retailer.

eParty Unlimited uses the Dynamic Video Sitemap service from Treepodia Ltd., a provider of online video management technology, to ensure a site’s product demonstration videos can be indexed by Google.

When Google posts search results for a term that the retailer has a video for, the search engine shows a thumbnail of the video, which helps eParty Unlimited stand out. “I’m confident that the image helps us draw attention,” he says.

The service works by optimizing a site’s text and content to ensure Google can access, correctly index, and display all of the site’s 2,260 videos. While search engine spiders—the crawlers that comb through the content from web sites and add it to search engine indexes—cannot usually decipher videos, Treepodia circumvents that problem by giving the videos a text meta-description and title that the search engines can understand.

That’s important, says Weng, because Google rewards sites that post original video content by boosting their rankings. “It’s very powerful,” he says. “Within less than a week all of our videos were indexed by Google, getting us to the first pages of organic search results for many popular search queries.”

Once on the retailer’s site, videos can help push a consumer to complete a purchase, says Weng. “Videos allow us to show customers how our products work,” he says.

And when a consumer sees how a product works, she is much more likely to convert. In the fourth quarter the conversion rate for consumers who watched a video was 8.3%, 43.1% higher than the 5.8% conversion rate for other consumers.